


Per Aspera Ad Astra

by r0landblum



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Alternate Universe - Boarding School, Alternate Universe - Human, Boarding School, Victorian
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-26
Updated: 2019-10-02
Packaged: 2020-10-28 14:22:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20780015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/r0landblum/pseuds/r0landblum
Summary: Ernest Aziraphale is a God-fearing and studious young man from a wealthy family of noble lineage.Anthony Crowley is a rambunctious delinquent with a mysterious past who somehow managed to get into Ernest's prestigious boarding school.





	1. Chapter I

_England, 1872_

The summer had not come to an end as yet, but in the spirits of young boys countrywide there was a dull on the horizon.  
Some 30 miles south-west of the city of London there was a sleepy parish town that was due to be awoken by the arrival of a school.  
Appearances meant Godalming was favoured as an idyllic and God-fearing town that boasted many a respectable attribute. Amongst the coniferous forests that enshroud the town like an overbearing matriarch and under the veil of languid tendrils of willow trees, the pastel blue spire of the Church of St Peter and St Paul can be distinctly seen. On its 40 acres of land, not only does lush greenery grace, but now also one of the most prestigious public schools in all of England.

Time ago it used to be a town of remarkable prosperity. It possessed diverse industry and provided trading opportunities and a point of rest for travellers between London and the English south-west coast. In 1859, however, the railway line was extended all the way down to Portsmouth and its use as a trading post diminished. Inns, taverns and public houses would shut down. Even Bargate Stone, which it was reputable for, went out of fashion.

Ernest Aziraphale was one of the many boys who were to have his spirits dulled by the impending cessation of the summer months. As the son of Baron Aziraphale, he had been attending and residing at the costly Charterhouse school since he was merely ten years of age. Before that, he was tutored, raised and entertained by a host of servants and nannies who were employed in the family stately home.  
Studying was a favourite activity of Ernest’s; he had a deep love for books.  
Tutoring sessions became something he looked forward to greatly, along with tea times where he was more often than not allowed extra scones with large helpings of cream and jam. He took to reading and writing with an impressive aptitude and often gravitated towards the books on natural sciences that were kept in the Aziraphale’s library.  
In the warmer months, he often requested his lessons be conducted outside in the estate’s many gardens and where he developed an affinity for nature and its many faces.  
This tendency was looked upon favourably by his parents, who spent their time hosting gatherings with a menagerie of important figures. It was not that Baron Aziraphale shunned his son, quite the contrary. Ernest was doted on by his entire family, for he was the Baron’s eldest - and only - child.  
Needless to say, this status bares a remarkable amount of pressure in regards to how one should act what one should achieve. This was not the wish of the Baron to bestow this upon his son, but try as the Baron might, the Baroness would never fall pregnant again.

As an only child surrounded by a flurry of adults and an air of politics and propriety, he was afforded with a profound maturity that did not do him any favours with his academic peers.  
However, at school, he and authority figures kept themselves in mutually favourable estimation, and although his coordination did not grant him athletic skill, his manners and ebullient attempts discouraged the games masters from their usual harsh nature.

Unfortunately, time takes its toll on even the sunniest of children, and the boy that would once frolic and guffaw came to stop and grow quiet.  
Public school life was safe to say, cruel, towards young Aziraphale and he was necessitated to discard his whimsical childhood demeanour early in his adolescence. Now at the age of seventeen, he was entering his final year of Charterhouse and the years had been less than kind.

Charterhouse had not always existed burrowed away in Surrey foliage, in fact, this was the year it underwent great uproot. The school originally operated in Smithfield, London commencing 1611 when funds were allocated to the building upon the death of the civil servant. His name was Thomas Sutton. It had originally been an actual charterhouse (or monastery) for the Carthusians, a Catholic order of highly pensive and solitary monks who wanted to recreate the living conditions of the Christian hermits that lived in the Chartreuse mountains of France.  
Previously it had been, and still is to this day, a 13-acre burial ground for those who fell victim to the Great Plague.

It never went unnoticed that there was an air of death that pervaded the institution. It was an unshakable component of Charterhouse that infected its very soul, especially since it also served as a hospital for the elderly at the time it spent in Smithfield.

The move to Godalming was a welcome one. At least, at first. The pupils hoped for a cleansing of the feeling of quietus that clung to their skin like light rain. An end to the shivering.  
Little did they know that more unfortunate and miserable circumstances were afoot.

*  
In was move-in day for the boys and Ernest had caught the first train into Godalming from London. It felt like he had returned home at the end of his penultimate year only yesterday, then the next thing he knew his father was to become lost in a sea of top hats waving goodbye on the railway platform of Waterloo once again.

He had spent much of his summer break vacationing in Brighton with his mother, aunts and cousins.  
Baroness Hortensia was a delight of a woman from which Ernest gained a lot of his favourable qualities. She was sharp and astute, and not the type to fill every quiet with idle chatter. Like every agreeable person, she understood the importance of comfortable and amicable silence.  
Cousin Gabriel however, did not.  
Gabriel was a gentleman by descent but by nature, a brute. It caused Ernest great displeasure that they were the same age and therefore in the same form at Charterhouse. He was a behemoth of a lad, all muscle and sinew with little brain or wit. Of course, he excelled at football and cricket, which provided him with many a school privilege - not that Gabriel needed any more reason for his sense of enormous entitlement.

One particular day, Ernest and his mother were sat on a quieter part of the beach close to the shore while the rest of the family decided to don their swimsuits and paddle. The Baroness wore one of her more simpler dresses yet was still swathed in material when she sat. Protecting herself from the sun with only a small hat and a parasol, she read The Maid of Sker by R.D Blackmore whilst Ernest occupied a chair next to her and painted.  
Gabriel approached the pair in the less modest option of swimming attire and immediately made a point of making Ernest’s afternoon difficult.  
‘Why aren’t you coming swimming?’ He asked, kicking stones relatively gently towards the seated boy’s feet. There was a smirk on his lips because he knew the answer already.  
Ernest looked downward and then to his cousin disdainfully before going back to his canvas, choosing to ignore him.  
Gabriel’s kicked rocks became more forceful, making Ernest start from his seat. The Baroness looked up from her book with a raised brow.  
‘Gabriel, don’t pester your cousin. He wants to stay here’.  
‘My mother is quite right’ added Ernest haughtily ‘leave me alone’.  
Ernest adjusted his clothing, feeling uncomfortable under Gabriel’s scrutinous gaze.  
‘You’re fully dressed at the beach Ernie.’ His smirk turned into a taunting laugh.

Ernest’s weight had always been a point of torment from Gabriel and the other boys at Charterhouse. As a child, there was scarcely a time when he was not pudgy, but there was also scarcely a time in his early childhood that he bore concern. Entering his adolescence, however, he became increasingly self-conscious and therefore more withdrawn, particularly from sports, which rendered him a rather stout young man today.

Saying that, his own body is not something Ernest was particularly displeased to be in, he was only embittered that other people seemed to be bothered about it. Sometimes he fantasised about not possessing a physical form at all so that nobody could look at him and make rash judgements. He had every faith that God would make it so when his days on Earth were over.

The train to Godalming was bustling with 150 children that were used to a capital city that could drown out their noise. Ernest could only pray that they would be too busy recalling their holidays with the friends they were reunited with to give him any grief before the term even began.  
The heat was still high so the young man had not resigned to his school uniform just yet. In his opinion, his own personal style harboured more softness and sophistication - two qualities he held very dear. A light unstarched linen shirt, pale yellow trousers, a notch collar vest of the same colour to go over arm when the heat rose at noon and a pair of tan brown brogues.  
He had yet to attempt to tame his hair.  
For now, his unruly ash-blonde curls were to sit under cover of a straw boater hat. It was a simple source of comfort.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! This is my first attempt at fiction I have made in 5 years so please be gentle! Comments are welcome and encouraged! Don’t forget to leave Kudos if you are enjoying it 😁


	2. Chapter I: Part II

The school was a little over a mile walk from the train station.  
Some boys opted to make use of carriages or trams to assist with their luggage, but most, in the springtime of their youth, made their way up the winding paths to Charterhouse heartily.

Ernest was not quite so fighting fit. His springtime had come and gone as far as he was concerned, and his hefty wood and leather travel trunks weighed him down considerably.  
It was not an unfamiliar labour, for Ernest was nothing if not a fan of home comforts. He had a fondness for certain editions of certain books, and liked to keep them close to hand at any given moment. There was also his small number of sketchbooks from his visits to certain parks or galleries, he kept them more like educational journals, copying methods from medical and scientific books he happened across. Between the pages, scattered family photographs, slipped in between pages to economise on space that would be taken up by photo frames. 

And there was, of course, his special collection of bibles. Ernest had kept every bible given to him since birth. His newest was gifted to him on his 16th birthday and was bound in black leather, textured and decorated with gold with ornate metal to protect the corners from wear. It was heavy and somewhat ominous. Despite it quite sufficient to have as one’s only bible, Ernest could not bring himself to part with any holy book that used to serve him. There was a feeling of sacrilege attached to the action that he could not make peace with. 

Even taking his luggage into consideration, he did not fancy the prospect of a carriage or a tram. His anxiety had been troublesome enough on the steam train and he found himself in dire need of quiet and solitude. 

He found himself stopping not too far from the station at the Church of St Peter and St Paul. It was a modest church apart from one element of grandeur, the large pale blue spire.  
The tower that it rested on was short and squat.  
Ernest laid one of his suitcases on its side on the grass to take a seat and study further, leaning forward to allow his fingers to brush against the grass while he soaked up the birth of the afternoon.  
The church had three large windows that were facing him, the middle and largest window was Gothic with both intersecting and reticulated tracery. It was sandwiched between two smaller windows of the same architectural style, but these were geometric and topped with roses.  
From the foundations of soil to the modest base of Bargate stone, all things pointed up towards heaven and had beauty upon high.  
It was a rather poetic display of piety.  
Ernest doubted that this would be the church that the school would take them to visit on Sundays and it caused a fleeting feeling of sadness before he let himself be yet again humbled by God. 

The rabble and crowds had mostly died out now, and nothing was left but the regular sounds of the town, the townsfolk off to the market and the crows that shadowed them.  
Arising from his perch, the boy took up his heavy luggage in his soft and unweathered hands once again and headed north, to his fate. 

*  
The first days of term were rife with perpetual misery. 

The school at first had the appearance of being grand. Its French-Gothic architecture boasted hood moulded mullioned windows, tremoils, or roses, sat in the apexes; pyramid roofed towers and gables that had lucarnes to shed light into the attics. Crocketed spiralietes protruded each corner and at each roof point a crucifix finial. Buttresses that supported the building were not immediately visible from the entrance but could be spotted from closer inspection. 

Inside the dorms, the ostentaiety would wear thin. It would be hard for anyone to find fault with the exteriors of the houses, much because the exteriors were very much finished. The interior furnishings were a decidedly different story indeed.  
The living rooms meant for the Uppers, or the Halls where all members of the respective house would dine for their earlier meals, with their oak-panelled walls and vast fireplaces were found to have no tables or chairs. Studies had no desks and their dormitory cubicles, no doors. The rather disagreeable state of affairs grew when the boys discovered they had no gas to fuel lamps with to assist their night-time reading.  
That was the most of their troubles until they discovered the rats. 

Problems with vermin led to ferrets being kept as working house-pets. Some of the students delighted in having them around and become quite fond, naming them and taking them for walks around the grounds. For others, they were simply spiders catching flies - the least unsavoury of two creatures. Ferrets, being part of the Mustelidae family, have potent scent glands that activate when they are frightened or angry. Given their purpose, it was in everyone’s best interest to keep them angry. The smell combined with the carcasses of rats that littered the dorms was hideous. 

The boys spent a large portion of their free time bathing as a way to escape the smell and combat the relentless summer heat. Or at least, they tried. Facilities were predictably limited and often the less discriminating pupils would resort to washing themselves in toilet basins. Particularly as the students spent a lot of time using their old bathwater to wash the ferrets. 

Ernest found the entire experience profoundly distressing. So distressing in fact he could not even bring himself to take delight in pet ferrets. He used to be remarkably hands-on with wildlife as a child, letting frogs use his hands as if they were lily pads, despite his tendency of being markedly clean. It was one of his many paradoxes.  
In this instance, the grime overtook hygiene to such an extent he took every measure to distance himself from animals in the house, pet or otherwise.  
Boys who did not take well to ferrets took to spending money on extra candles to keep them at bay.  
Since candelabras were not currently at hand, empty bottles of ginger beer were repurposed as candle holders, alongside regular sitting on the floor, it had made the living space seem closer to that of a thespian commune.  
Ernest was sitting on his bed one evening after most of the dorm had gone to sleep reading one of his more older bibles from his childhood by candlelight. The varnished oak of the partitions reflected well so he wasn’t struggling all too much, finding some semblance of peace even, when he was startled by a rat scurrying towards him. His gut reaction was to throw the nearest candle he had to hand. Unfortunately for the rat, he threw with surprising dexterity in his moment of panic. The bottle collided with the rat at speed and smashed. It made a terrible screech and ran off quite injured, Young Aziraphale was horrified as he could not recall hurting an animal before in his life. Of course, with there being no doors and the cubicles having no individual ceilings, sound travelled without hindrance. Ernest was already in a state of repentant woe when the house master came in to discover the scene, a broken bottle and a seventeen-year-old boy who was up past his bedtime, crying.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! This is my first attempt at fiction I have made in 5 years so please be gentle! Comments are welcome and encouraged! Don’t forget to leave Kudos if you are enjoying it 😁


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